Ubuntu
gnome-applets package

multiload-applet-2's "network use" graph is almost useless

Bug #24760 reported by Chris Moore on 2005-10-29

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #15436: network usage wrong because of scaling. Edit Remove

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	gnome-applets (Ubuntu)	Invalid	Medium	Sebastien Bacher

Bug Description

Gnome's system monitor can put a small graph of network usage in the panel. The
graph it shows is automatically scaled, so it is impossible to tell whether the
network is busy or not.

Sometimes I have a steady 1k per second of transfer and the graph shows a high
level and tooltip tells me that network is 90% in use. Other times I can be
downloading 200k per second from a bursty torrent and see network 5% in use.
The autoscaler doesn't give any indication of what scale it is using, which
makes it impossible to interpret the graph.

The disk usage graph also uses the autoscaler, and so presumably suffers from
the same problem.

(version: breezy)

Revision history for this message

Chris Moore (dooglus) wrote on 2005-10-31:

the graph makes it look like there's a lot of network traffic, but there's none Edit (80.2 KiB, image/png)

Created an attachment (id=4838)
the graph makes it look like there's a lot of network traffic, but there's none

When this snapshot was taken, there was almost no network traffic. I had an
SMB shared drive mounted, which generates around 1.5kbytes/second of network
traffic. The network usage graph shows that the network is 78% in use.

Revision history for this message

Chris Moore (dooglus) wrote on 2005-10-31:

the graph makes it look like there's no network traffic, but there's lots Edit (146.3 KiB, image/png)

Created an attachment (id=4839)
the graph makes it look like there's no network traffic, but there's lots

When this snapshot was taken, I was downloading a torrent. I was downloading
100kb/s and uploading 80kb/s. The graph says that the network is only 5% used.

This is because just before I took the snapshot I uploaded a big file to a
local shared drive at 5mb/s. The graph has been scaled down as a result.

This scaling means that it's impossible to tell how busy the network is by
looking at the graph.

At the time of writing, the torrent is still downloading at the same rate, but
now the graph shows the network being 80% busy. It seems that the autoscaler
has 'forgotten' about the fast local upload I did earlier.

Revision history for this message

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2006-01-07:

Thanks for your bug. That's the same issue than #9129. If you have some
suggestion on how you would like to get the behaviour changed feel free to
comment on it.

This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 15436.